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Editorial : And now, a word from the sponsors . . . – IT can’t be easy selling a product that has a good chance of killing you, or at least ruining your health, but tobacco companies certainly don’t give up easily. Advertising cigarettes on TV was banned

IT can’t be easy selling a product that has a good chance of killing you,
or at least ruining your health, but tobacco companies certainly don’t give up
easily. Advertising cigarettes on TV was banned in Britain in 1965, and since
then smokers have almost totally disappeared from the screen. These days, it’s a
shock to watch an old movie and see the stars chain-smoking. And, of course,
many magazines now refuse cigarette ads (New Scientist
included).

But as cigarette ads on TV have become impossible in most advanced nations,
tobacco money has poured into buying space on huge roadside billboards and
sponsoring sport and public events. It’s easy to stop the billboards, and in
Britain the Labour Party says that it would ban such advertising if it were in
power.

But what about sponsorship? Here, we get onto trickier ground. Sponsorship
benefits many sports and it even benefits scientific research, as we’ll be
exploring in detail next week. Though it has never been very clear how directly
sponsorship boosts cigarette sales because research has been rare.

That’s why a new study from Goa in India is particularly welcome (see p 6).
In the 1995 India-New Zealand cricket series, televised live, the Indian players
went out with a tobacco company’s logo prominently displayed on their shirts.
Teenagers who watched the series were later found to be more likely to
experiment with smoking. Some believed that smoking improved performance at
cricket and even that some of the Indian team were smokers (none were).

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Let’s see some more research like this to get at the real impact of
sponsorship. The tobacco industry is not likely to provide the data, although
it’s hard to believe they would pay all that sponsorship money in if it didn’t
create some calculated sales and smokers. Research at Strathclyde University
revealed several years ago that young children clearly learn from sponsorship
about the links between products and exciting activities like motor racing.

The Labour Party currently does not plan to ban sponsorship but there is a
considerable internal debate over whether this should be changed. Targeted
research might be just what is needed to help drive another nail into tobacco’s
future.